On the heels of an Oscar nomination, “The Aviator” star Leonardo DiCaprio (news) wrapped a high-flying week by accepting the Platinum Award from the Santa Barbara International Film Festival.

The award, created to commemorate the festival’s 20th anniversary, was given Sunday night in recognition of the actor’s “exceptional career,” festival director Roger Durling said.

…

“It’s a lifetime achievement award, which is completely and utterly surreal, given I’m only 30 years old,” he continued, with a laugh. “But, you know, what has it been? Almost 17 years now. I’ve done quite a few films. But what’s really exciting, for me, is that this is what I really love doing. It’s what I want to do for the rest of my life.”

If they are giving lifetime acheivement awards to 30 year olds, those actors over 30 years of age should be getting a little bit nervous right now. Who knows how much the lifespan of the Hollywood set will drop in the next year or two.

Why don’t we just give next years lifetime acheivement award to the Olsen Twins and be done with the whole damn thing?

A Connecticut serial killer who tried to speed his own execution stopped the process hours before he was to be put to death Monday by agreeing to have his own competency examined.

A death warrant allowing Michael Ross’ execution was to expire late Monday. Lawyers say it could be months before legal hurdles are cleared and the execution be allowed to go forward.

…

Ross would have been the first person to be executed in New England in 45 years. His death by lethal injection was scheduled for last Wednesday and postponed three times as new court challenges emerged. It had been rescheduled for 9 p.m. Monday before the state Supreme Court granted motions from Ross’ attorney and prosecutors for another stay of execution.

Under state law, the execution cannot be scheduled for at least a month after a new warrant is issued.

I honestly don’t think ANYONE involved with this case would have been fighting this hard if the man did NOT want to die anyway.

Le Moyne College is an institution that claims to be promoting a more just society.

Le Moyne College is a diverse learning community that strives for academic excellence in the Catholic and Jesuit tradition through its comprehensive programs rooted in the liberal arts and sciences. Its emphasis is on education of the whole person and on the search for meaning and value as integral parts of the intellectual life. Le Moyne College seeks to prepare its members for leadership and service in their personal and professional lives to promote a more just society.

Obviously their idea of a more just society is one where the members of such society are censored, disrespected, and treated with the “do as we say, not as we do” mentality.

While students are guaranteed the freedom of speech, LeMoyne College’s recent actions against a student have raised questions of whether or not academic papers are the place to exercise this right.

LeMoyne College expelled Scott McConnell, a student from its Masters of Education program, for writing a paper in which he advocated the use of corporal punishment in schools, he said.

The paper, written for a class on classroom management, originally earned McConnell an A-. However, when he attempted to enroll in classes for the spring semester, he found he couldn’t.

“LeMoyne doesn’t believe students should be able to express their own views,” McConnell said. “If you differ from our philosophical ideal you will be expelled from our college.”

If Le Moyne has such a problem with corporal punishment, I would like to know why so many of my friends who attended Catholic schools never cease to tell me about the smacks they got from the nuns? So much for their argument of “excellence in the Catholic tradition”. But maybe that tradition has changed. Maybe they are kissing kids now instead of spanking them. How should I know?

Why should he be punished for writing a paper about a topic for “classroom management” that he actually got an excellent grade for? It is obvious that others think he did an excellent job in writing his paper. Is it a difference of philosophical ideal? Is it the pot calling the kettle black?

The issues that this case raises are very complicated, said Joseph Shedd, chair of the teaching and leadership programs in Syracuse University’s School of Education.

It is about more than just a student’s right to express their own opinions, he said.

“There is no clean dividing line between a person’s opinions and his or her ability to make responsible professional judgments,” Shedd said in an e-mail.

He’s right. There isn’t. There is no clean dividing line. In fact, most responsible professional people I know base their judgments on their education, past experiences, and their opinion of what is best at the time for the situation at hand. It would be hard to tell which was used when one attempted to evaluate another’s ability to make such judgments. Even if Mr. McConnell turned in a less than satisfactory paper which was based solely on his own opinions, I would not understand why the school would deny his enrollment this semester. They themselves are showing their lack of ability to make responsible professional judgments.

Hell, the Le Moyne College mission statement clearly states that they concentrate on the education of the whole person and their “search for the meaning and value as integral parts of the intellectual life”. It’s painfully obvious that the term “intellectual life” does not apply to the administrators of this college.

Good Luck Mr. McConnell. Take this experience with you, and use it wisely, when you venture down the road of professional life.

As most of you know my wife has gone back to school. This semester she is taking “Integrated Science”. Of course, one of the “issues” they are covering is world population growth. Below is an introduction to the current section they are studying,

Raji, a thin rail of a teenager, scavenges through the mountain of garbage looking for anything edible. His diet consists of what was left on the plates of the customers who ate at the luxurious hotel. This does not begin to compare to the wonderful food that his mother had cooked with the crops raised in their own garden in the country. Raji?s father moved them to New Delhi when the family farm became too small to feed the whole family of eight. Raji makes a daily run on the garbage cans to try to find enough food to feed his siblings. His little sister is very sick with dysentery, as Raji and his family have to wash their dishes in the ditch water, which is brown with sewage and pollutants. Raji wonders what kind of life he has ahead of him. Will he have a chance to go to school? Will he even survive to adulthood? If he does, will there be enough food and shelter to provide for him and his countrymen?

Maria and her eight brothers and sisters live in a family farmhouse on the outskirts of Rio de Janeiro. Maria?s father and her brothers removed the trees from the forest behind their house so that they could raise cattle for beef to export. The farm is too small to support the family, so Maria and her sisters travel to the city every day to work in a factory in order to bring home extra money. They must travel through a shantytown to get to the city. The shantytown is full of lean-to shacks with close to 2 million people. Maria knows these are people who once lived in a farmhouse like her but had to move because of development or because their farms would no longer support their families. Maria wonders if she will have to move to the shantytown.

William, a young robust teenager who lives in a 2 story house outside of Chicago, announces that he is starving and has nothing to eat, as he throws away the remainder of his lunch of a sandwich, apple, chips, and chocolate chip cookies (he throws away everything but the chips and cookies). William is 50 lbs. overweight and spends his afternoons playing video games and watching TV. He only likes to eat pizza and burgers and fries. He does not like to go to school. William does not worry about his future; he just wants to get a car when he turns sixteen.

In their attempt to show three cases of children facing the adverse effects of their culture, rather than make a real comparison with one of the hundreds of thousands of children in America who are really starving and longing for a better life, they have decided to make a political social statement about hunger and life in America, which paints a laughable picture in comparison with those children in India, or Brazil.

While they focus on William who lives in a nice house, is picky about what he wants to eat, and is overweight and obviously not starving to death, they totally ignore the thousands of children in the Chicago area who actually have no home, who forage for food in garbage piles very similar to the one Raji scours each night, and will never be in danger of being “picky” or overweight.

Why did the course instructors pick this introduction for this topic? Do they really think William is a fair representation of the effects of “population growth” in our society, or are they trying to influence the opinion of the students, many of whom are naive, and not as smart as my wife?

For what purpose, other than liberal indoctrination to the “evils of America”, would this overview serve?

Apparently, Hillary Clinton has been changing positions on key issues so quickly that she became dizzy and collapsed today.

Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton collapsed Monday during a speech on Social Security, moments after complaining about a stomach virus.

“She fainted after not feeling well, got medical attention and is proceeding with her planned schedule,” according to a statement released by her office in Washington.

Colleen DiPirro, president of the Amherst Chamber of Commerce, told WBEN-AM radio that Clinton told the crowd she was feeling weak and had had a stomach virus. Clinton started to speak then collapsed, DiPirro told the radio station.

Clinton, 57, was smiling when she walked out of the private club where she had collapsed, the club’s general manager said.

“I saw her walk out the door by herself, she smiled and said ‘thank you’,” said Saturn Club general manager Vincent Tracy.

Later Monday, she arrived at a Catholic college where she was to speak about health care. Several hundred people were waiting to hear that address. There were also dozens of anti-abortion protesters waiting at the college.

She was either very dizzy from changing course so rapidly, or she was just trying to drum up press coverage so more people might hear what she wanted to squawk err speak about.

It all started on Friday afternoon when the sleet began to fall. Just before dusk, this is how our truck looked…

I sure am glad I decided not to fire up the grill this weekend…

Of course, by early Saturday morning, just before the real accumulation of our ice, I noticed a raccoon (or some other clawed critter) attempted to break into the bird feeder…

Notice the “fresh” rip marks on the right side of the feeder.

We spent the weekend chillin’, not grillin’. Things got a bit chilly, and the mailbox had over an inch of ice on it by this morning…

Anyway… We are fine, and everything is hunky dory… If you couldn’t get here earlier today, it had nothing to do with the ice storm, and everything to do with dns issues at the provider level, but those should be resolved by now.

AIDS among infants, which only a decade ago took the lives of hundreds of babies a year and left doctors in despair, may be on the verge of being eliminated in the United States, public health officials say.

In 1990, as many as 2,000 babies were born infected with H.I.V., the virus that causes AIDS; now, that number has been reduced to a bit more than 200 a year, according to health officials. In New York City, the center of the epidemic, there were 321 newborns infected with H.I.V. in 1990, the year the virus peaked among newborns in the city. In 2003, five babies were born with the virus.

Across the country, mother-to-child transmission of H.I.V. has dropped so sharply that public health officials now talk about wiping it out.

“This is a dramatic and wonderful success story,” said Dr. Vicki Peters, the head of pediatric surveillance for the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene. This winter, Dr. Peters presented a report in Bangkok for World AIDS Day documenting the improvement in New York.

The success in fighting mother-to-child transmission, a sweeping victory for public health officials, was made possible largely because of better drugs, but aggressive public education and testing, as well as cooperation at the federal and local levels, also played a significant role.

The advent of AZT, a drug used to attack H.I.V. in the blood and central nervous system, was critical. But equally important was simply getting mothers to know their H.I.V. status before they gave birth, a problem complicated by privacy and political and social issues.

Much of the developing world continues to be ravaged by AIDS, however. In sub-Saharan Africa, more than two million people died of the disease last year. “We have had incredible progress,” said Dr. Lynne Mofenson, the chief of the Pediatric, Adolescent and Maternal AIDS Branch of the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, part of the National Institutes of Health. “But if you think about the U.S. and New York and then you think about Africa, it is like a tale of two cities, a tale of two epidemics.”

These are significant results.

A Mexican government official has threatened to use international courts to block an Arizona law meant to prohibit illegal aliens from receiving public benefits and voting rights.

Foreign Secretary Luis Ernesto Derbez said in a radio interview Wednesday that an international strategy would be used if other attempts to reverse Proposition 200 fail, the Associated Press reported.

…

Mexican officials have repeatedly complained about Proposition 200, which went into effect Tuesday. The statewide measure denies most taxpayer benefits to illegal aliens and requires state workers to report applicants for such benefits who may not be eligible. It also requires anyone registering to vote in the state to show proof of citizenship and bring a government-issued ID to the polling place.

<sarcasm>Gasp. Can you imagine the atrocity of this legislation? Damn. How can anyone support a law that requires a person to be a legal resident of the United States before given benefits which are only for legal residents of the United States? How can anyone support a law that asks state employees to uphold the law? How can anyone support a law that requires a person to show proof of U.S. citizenship and show valid ID in order to vote in elections within the United States? How appalling.</sarcasm>

The Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund has challenged Prop. 200, saying it is “an illegal, impermissible, unconstitutional state attempt to regulate immigration policy, which is a fundamental function and responsibility of our federal government. Proposition 200 is mean-spirited and un-American.”

Proposition 200 does not attempt to regulate immigration policy. It merely attempts to make sure that people who ignore our immigration laws and are in our country illegally do not take advantage of the already limited benefit system and do not attempt to skew the results of our elections, which they have no damn business voting in anyway.

I can’t believe Mr. Derbez is actually threatening to bring this to the international courts. We all know it will go nowhere, but the sheer audacity of his idiocy truly amazes me.

The execution of a serial killer who wants to die has been halted, an hour before it was due to be carried out, at his lawyer’s request.

The latest twist came hours after the Supreme Court rejected a final appeal to save Michael Ross, who murdered eight women aged 14-25 in the 1980s.

His execution by lethal injection would be the first in the state for 45 years.

His attorney said he was seeking the postponement for 48 hours because of a possible conflict of interest.

Lawyer T R Paulding said that his client had not requested the delay.

The execution has now been put back from 0201 (0701GMT) on Saturday to 2100 on Monday (0200GMT Tuesday).

His attorney requested the stay because the appeals court got it all wrong? The man killed eight woman and now he wants to die. What part of “he wants to die” don’t they understand? He committed the crimes, he was tried and convicted, he wants to die. I see no problem granting his last request. Leave him alone already.